Improving Reading Comprehension One Word at a Time…

Abstract

A group of seventh grade teachers and administrators work to improve reading through careful yet intense formative assessment focused on enhanced vocabulary instruction as an integral building block for success.The challenge of literacy in middle schoolFor years, teachers and administrators at our Los Angeles middle school have grappled with the poor reading skills of our middle school students. Discouraged by the reading scores on standardized tests and frustrated with the limits of our readers, we struggled to improve reading comprehension in our heterogeneous classrooms. Our professional mandate was clear: We needed to develop accurate comprehension assessments of our students beyond annual standardized testing, and we needed to learn to translate this knowledge into practice across the curriculum. Based on our student population and the research on reading in middle schools, we focused our work on vocabulary development, improving reading comprehension one word at a time.We knew that our local challenge was embedded within a distressing national context. In fact, reading failure has been called a national health problem. Joshi and colleagues (2009) reported that in the United States, roughly 6 million secondary students read far below grade level, and approximately 3,000 students drop out of U.S. high schools every day.Our particular challenge assumed a greater sense of urgency because middle school provides the last chance for many students to build the sufficient reading skills necessary to succeed in demanding courses (Biancarosa & Snow, 2006). Propelled by reading-focused accountability programs and by the growing recognition of the widespread need to address literacy in later stages of schooling, schools in the United States are increasingly providing reading instruction to a large portion of middle school students (Palincsar, Nair, Deshler, & Biancarosa, 2007). Yet, in spite of the burgeoning national concern about late literacy development, limited understanding plagues administrators and the teaching profession regarding the particular challenges students in middle school face when they encounter texts in the classroom. We face a shortage of academic exploration of the different profiles of readers in middle school who are typically, and often inaccurately, clustered into high, medium, or low groups. Middle school teachers know all too well that middle school readers exhibit characteristics that defy simple categorization; students possess strengths and weaknesses in the realms of vocabulary, accuracy, motivation, and higher-order thinking (Guthrie, & Humenick, 2004; Moje, 2006; Primor, Pierce, & Katzir, 2011; Snow, 2010). Over the past year, we implemented an assessment system that revealed the strengths and weaknesses of our readers in these subskills, and we developed a research-based approach to changing our classroom practice to improve reading comprehension across the curriculum.The misconception of reading development in middle schoolRemarkably, a systematic, wide-ranging review of the research on reading comprehension in middle school does not exist (Vaughn et al., 2010). The What Works Clearinghouse (2007), published by the U.S. Department of Education (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/ PLATO_030210.pdf) has completed a review of research on elementary school reading programs; however, its long-term plans do not even include a review of research on secondary reading programs. Of course, despite the horrors of this deficit, given the emphasis that federal mandatory testing places on reading at all levels, please note the multilayered professional neglect found here in the absence of explicit attention given to reading at the middle level. Indeed, middle grades teachers often focus more on content than on developing reading comprehension skills and subskills. This longstanding trend stems from older, theoretical models of how we learn to read (Chall & Conard, 1991) and from similar malpractice that comes from lingering persistence of the old junior high model, where strict concern for academic matters result in neglecting the importance of relevance and the whole child that comes in the wake of the middle school movement. …